A Kiwi living in Tel Aviv says there doesn't seem to be any path to peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, at least in the short term.
New Zealander Alex Jones studied international conflict resolution in Tel Aviv University and has spent years working in Israel and the West Bank.
Jones told Q+A the October 7 attacks by Hamas fighters "struck at the very heart of what it is to be Israeli" for many living in Israel.
"There's a huge desire to exterminate Hamas, whatever that means," Jones said about what he had been hearing from people in Israel.
"I think these attacks stirred up some of the worst… collective memories for many Israelis of the Holocaust and pogroms."
He added while no one wanted civilian deaths in Gaza, the urge to retaliate after the October 7 attacks was strong.
Israel's officials said the initial attacks by Hamas killed at least 1400 Israelis, most of whom were civilians.
On Friday, the Gaza-based Ministry of Health – an agency of the Hamas-controlled government – published a list of people killed in Gaza since October 7. It said about 7000 deaths, of which more than 3500 are children, could be attributed to Israeli military "aggression".
Jones said, for most people in Israel, the Palestinian cause for an independent state and Hamas have been largely conflated.
"People are still really traumatised by what went on a few weeks ago. So, talking about the Palestinian cause is not high on the agenda of most Israelis today, here and now."
He said, across the political spectrum in Israel, no one was seriously talking about a two-state solution.
"The two-state solution is still the dream of the labour movement, the left-wing movement of [Israel's former Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin and the people who signed the Oslo Accords in the 1990s.
"The activists of today, they're not really talking about the two-state solution anymore," he said.
"The only place you do hear about it is internationally where it is the modus operandi."
As for his friends in the West Bank, Jones said they were "really fed up" after decades of Israeli occupation.
"[There's] a lot of anger and you see that in the streets. There's people dying in the West Bank all the time. Unfortunately, it's kind of being overlooked because of the numbers of casualties in Gaza," Jones said.
"I think, at a strategic level, the fear that if something did really kick off [in the West Bank] in a big way, it might be much, much harder to fight a war on two, three, even four fronts. So people in the higher echelons are certainly very concerned about it."
The Palestinian Health Ministry in the West Bank said more than 100 Palestinians have been killed in the area since October 7. Many of the deaths are the result of raids by Israeli troops, although there has also been violence between Palestinians and Israeli settlers.
Jones said there was little inward reflection in Israel so far about what role, if any, the occupation of West Bank and Gaza may have played in the latest outburst of conflict.
"There is still a small peace camp who are definitely looking in the mirror at this stage. But by and large, I don't think that's a consensus opinion... for most men and women on the street, it's not about what we've done that caused this."
He said many Israelis felt they were being abandoned by the world in their fight against Hamas.
"Let's be fair - Israel held the moral high ground for a very short amount of time in this," he said.
"The response was so brutal and so fast... what's happened in the United Nations has really shocked people [in Israel] and the wave of anti-Semitic attacks which have growth throughout a lot of the Western world, in Europe, in other places.
"It's really shocked a lot of Israelis – they are constantly surprised they're on the back end of bad press internationally.
"They feel this is a justified response and it's very painful for them to see the way the world is responding so quickly and so vehemently against what is going on in Gaza."
Jones said it was hard to remain optimistic.
"Maybe, if we are going to find some small silver lining or glimmer of hope out of all this mess, it's that change sometimes does bring about positive change, and maybe there's some new path that we haven't seen yet," he said.
"But it's pretty hard to see a strategic goal here that is going to bring about a peaceful solution in the near-term. It's not really something which I hear a lot of Israelis even talking about at the moment – for them, I think the goal is to eliminate Hamas.
"That will bring about this kind of peace in the short term.
"But it's pretty hard to destroy some of the ideas that Hamas stand for and not a lot of Israelis, or Palestinians for that matter, are very optimistic at the moment about a peaceful resolution in a bigger sense."
Israeli defence forces expanded their ground operation in Gaza overnight.
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